The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 eBook

The corporation income tax law was really an act of
popular dislike of corporations exercising great monopolies.
Grouping all the little corporations with them was
an absurdity and a cruelty.

Corporations have no feelings. They are not wounded
by the hostility of legislatures. The managers
of corporations of large capital have feelings, and
some of them are wounded in their pride by this hostility.
But they need not suffer in their pockets. They
are abundantly able to protect their own property;
they know how to make money on the short side of the
market as well as the long side. But the managers
of the concerns of small capital are seldom able to
do this. Oppressive laws cause suffering to them,
to the mere holders of stock in all corporations, to
the creditors of all, to the employees, and to the
customers. Many of these laws profess to be meant
to favor small people as against big people—­to
restrain the rich corporations so that the poor ones
may have more liberty. There is no evidence to
show that this result is attained, or that the country
would be better off if it were attained. But
there is plenty of evidence to show that half the
people of the country are suffering from these legislative
attacks on their property. The men who manage
the great corporations, whatever their faults, are
men of enterprise and courage. They are the true
progressives; the prosperity that they diffuse among
the whole people is ordinarily more than can be destroyed
by our progressive politicians. They are now
beginning to feel that their rulers are discriminating
against them as a class, and are uneasy and disheartened,
and reluctant to embark in new enterprises; and the
progress of the country is halted by their apprehension.
It is not the rich who suffer most: it is “the
unemployed,” and the millions of dumb, helpless,
struggling thrifty men and women whose hard earned
savings constitute a large part of the capital of
the corporations; and who are already alarmed at the
shrinking value of these savings. It is, perhaps
most of all, the mass of ignorant unthrifty poor,
whose chief wealth is the wages paid them by the corporations
which they are taught to look on as their oppressors.

RAILWAY JUNCTIONS

In his illuminating essay on The Lantern-Bearers,
Stevenson complains of the vacuity of that view of
life which he finds expressed in the pages of most
realistic writers. “This harping on life’s
dulness and man’s meanness is a loud profession
of incompetence; it is one of two things: the
cry of the blind eye, I cannot see, or the
complaint of the dumb tongue, I cannot utter.”
And then, with a fine flourish, he declares:—­“If
I had no better hope than to continue to revolve among
the dreary and petty businesses, and to be moved by
the paltry hopes and fears with which they surround
and animate their heroes, I declare I would die now.
But there has never an hour of mine gone quite so
dully yet; if it were spent waiting at a railway junction,
I would have some scattering thoughts, I could count
some grains of memory, compared to which the whole
of one of these romances seems but dross.”